We shall now see how it was with the Church.
INDIVIDUALISM.

Individualism rests on the principle that a man shall be his own master, that he shall have liberty to form his own opinions, freedom to carry into effect his resolves.

He is, therefore, ever brought into competition with his fellow-men.

His life is a display of energy.
To remove the stagnation of centuries front European life, to vivify suddenly what had hitherto been an inert mass, to impart to it individualism, was to bring it into conflict with the influences that had been oppressing it.

All through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries uneasy strugglings gave a premonition of what was coming.
In the early part of the sixteenth (1517), the battle was joined.
Individualism found its embodiment in a sturdy German monk, and therefore, perhaps necessarily, asserted its rights under theological forms.